Intercultural Bilingual Education in Chilean classrooms: Exploring youth identities, multiculturalism and nationalism

Lead Research Organisation: University of Cambridge
Department Name: Geography

Abstract

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Description We discovered through sustained work with indigenous teenagers how they understand their position in Chilean society which has historically marginalized indigenous people, and what prospects they envision for themselves when they become citizens. We were interested to know how young people saw themselves in relation to reforms in education that award more visibility to indigenous culture and knowledge, and to explore how realistic their hopes were about the job opportunities and forms of participation.
The first major finding of the research concerned the ambivalent position of Mapuche teenagers regarding their position in Chilean society. Specifically they articulate in their discussions a tension between being Mapuche (a status that is criminalized in public debate, although they generally feel that Mapuche have valid claims to have their voices and distinctive perspective heard) on the one hand, versus their optimism regarding the possibilities for incorporation into Chilean society on the basis of disregarding any features of being Mapuche that tie them to an irrelevant past. The research findings permitted us to examine the complexities and crosscutting dynamics of youth positionality regarding Mapuche territory (the basis of ethnic political claims), formal education, and their expectations regarding adult citizenship (Children's Geographies 2014; Space and Polity forthcoming). These findings opened up a key question regarding how indigenous youth identify with and practice relations with land and territory, as our findings showed how the young people held perspectives on ancestral land and territorial rights that neither echoed Mapuche activists on this theme, nor did they unthinkingly espouse Chilean public opinion. Given the generational shifts and urbanization of indigenous young people, these findings raise important questions of how indigenous rights claims can be made meaningful across generations, and how indigenous young people can be heard in Chilean public debates. Sarah Radcliffe is carrying forward these new directions in collaborative work with Chilean researchers, as well as by convening a panel at a major conference in 2015 which will compare experiences across Latin America.

A second major finding was that indigenous and their allies in the educational sector in Chile express critical interpretations of intercultural education programmes in general and in Chile specifically. The officials, working currently in Chilean intercultural bilingual education for the state at various national and regional levels, expressed complex critiques of the ways in which education policy was devised, interpreted and implemented. This material permitted us to explore the nature of postcolonial positionality among these state workers, and examine the comparison between subalterns working in the state, and neoliberal professionals (Comparative Studies in Society and History 2015). This material and analysis acts to further debates in postcolonial studies regarding the longer term consequences of state reform, and the extent of power for indigenous subjects within neoliberal forms of government.

A third finding concerns the impact of discourses and practices that owe their power to an association with whiteness on southern Chile's educational landscape. In contrast to previous discussions of the social context for education in the region, our work documents how implicit notions of whiteness and aspirations to become whiter (and less indigenous) operate in the spaces and social relations of the secondary schools in this indigenous-majority area. Our findings hence extend in new and important directions the understandings of the dynamics between racialization, exclusion and indigenous experience of education in Chile (Intercultural Studies forthcoming 2015).
Exploitation Route In addition to plans for further academic publications, we anticipate that academic networks established during the research period will result in new international collaborations for future research. Arising out of this project, Sarah Radcliffe has been invited to collaborate with Dr M.E. Merino (Catholic University, Temuco, Chile) on a research project funded by FUNDECYT (National Fund for Science and Technology Development, Ministry of Education, Chile) on 'Narrating place identities: Sociocultural places recreated by indigenous Mapuche families in Santiago, Chile' (2014-17).
Additionally, we prepared a document of research findings to demonstrate the extended educational policy consequences of our research, that has been distributed among educationalists and related professionals in Chile.
In May 2015, we were invited to submit our research papers to a review for the Chilean Ministry of Interculturalism for a review on interculturalism and youth.
Sectors Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education
URL http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/chilebilingualeducation/
 
Description The local and national Ministry of Education offices have been able to access our core findings.
First Year Of Impact 2014
Sector Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education
Impact Types Societal
 
Description 'Narrating place identities: Sociocultural places recreated by indigenous Mapuche families in Santiago, Chile' 
Organisation Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Country Chile 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution Sarah Radcliffe is to collaborate with Dr M.E. Merino (Catholic University, Temuco, Chile) on a research project funded by FUNDECYT (National Fund for Science and Technology Development, Ministry of Education, Chile) in 2014-17.
Collaborator Contribution Merino will coordinate the research project,undertake the relevant interviews in Santiago, do the linguistic analysis
Impact Sarah Radcliffe organized a Panel at the Latin American Studies Association XXXIII International Congress in San Juan Puerto Rico, on INDIGENOUS YOUTH AND SPACE, LAND AND TERRITORY (San Juan Puerto Rico, 26-30 May 2015), at which my collaborator Maria Eugenia Merino presented a paper on her research material. The papers from this panel are currently being prepared for publication in a peer review journal. Additionally, the contact with Sarah Radcliffe led to further research collaboration with Andrew Webb (formerly PDRA on the Chilean ESRC project; now lecturer at Instituto de Sociologia, P. Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago).
Start Year 2014
 
Description Indigenous youths, nation and identities: Examining the secondary IBE agenda in Chilean classrooms 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Chile is a multiethnic, highly educated and highly racialised country. Within a series of longstanding neoliberal reforms, Chile introduced programmes for intercultural bilingual education (IBE) at primary and, recently, secondary level, to incorporate and educate diverse indigenous ('indian') populations. In the context of uneasy alliances between neoliberal reformers and IBE policymakers, the roll-out of secondary IBE represents a key test of the nature and scope for profound educational reform. Moreover, national identity and citizenship is being reconfigured, both in street-based contests between Mapuche ethnic rights groups and through contestations over meanings of belonging, ethnicity and citizenship in the classroom. The paper reports from an ongoing research project with Mapuche young people and schools in Region VIII and IX, exploring the dynamics of classroom practices, state-endorsed curricular content, local cultural practices, and a generation of young people whose educational opportunities are much greater than their parents'. We view IBE as a key institutional and discursive arena for the negotiation of indigenous rights, national identity, and of changing power relations between the state and indian rights organisations. Contextualising secondary IBE and young peoples in relation to neoliberal multicultural reforms, we analyse the scope for the emergence of modern, educated Mapuche.

After this talk, public awareness of our research work has increased in southern Chile.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
 
Description Indigenous youths, nation and identities: Examining the secondary IBE agenda in Chilean classrooms 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Concerns over the equity of the Chilean education system received global recognition following student mobilisations and protests during 2011 and 2012. Neoliberal reforms to education during the military dictatorship exacerbated existing income and socioeconomic differentials among the national population. Amongst those most affected are ethnic minorities, and in particular indigenous populations (comprising 7% nationally). Existing research demonstrates that within the skewed education system, indigenous pupils suffer from worse access to high achieving schools and on average obtain lower test-scores than non-indigenous pupils. Explanations for these inequalities require an analysis of racialised experiences of schooling. In this paper, we provide grounded evidence of how race and ethnicity come together in education processes for Mapuche pupils, and the responses that they provoke. We suggest that pupils' negotiations regarding race-ethnicity and education are ambivalent and precarious. On the one hand, pupils continue to be uprooted from family and communities during their weekly boarding in schools, while on the other 'supplementary' Intercultural Bilingual Education provides more of a folkloric cultural dimension of Mapuche identity and fails to address epistemic violence or racism.

After this talk, Andrew Webb and Sarah Radcliffe have each been invited to participate in further Chilean research projects and consultancy activities related to interculturalism and education, and indigenous youth
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013
 
Description Positioning interculturalism in Chile's Intercultural bilingual Education Programme: Neo-liberal constraints and failed practices of pluralism 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Reforms to education in Chile, regarding indigenous populations, have followed a similar path to other countries in Latin America owing largely to pressure from international organisations such as the World Bank and OECD, and attention brought by global media to indigenous demands for greater autonomy across the continent. The Intercultural Bilingual Education Programme (PEIB), launched in 2000 by the Chilean Ministry of Education promised to offer alternate pedagogies from the colonising mechanisms of schooling that went before it. Interculturalism therefore became at once both a source of hope for indigenous populations working towards greater recognition within the nation-state, and a crucial signifier in state rhetoric for its multicultural project which would replace exclusionary practices of the past. In practice however, interculturalism's position between these two spheres remains uneasy, having failed to deliver either. In this conference paper we draw on fieldwork to argue that these tensions owe to the restrictive types of diversity and pluralism which Chile's neo-liberal multiculturalism is able to accommodate.* Interculturalism therefore remains at the margins of legislative reform and in classroom practices continues to construct indigenous pupils as Other.

After this talk, Sarah Radcliffe and Andrew Webb have had more requests for our publications, and we have held conversations with a wider group of professional practitioners and researchers.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013